Monroe's Method and the Regent's Repertoire

An American and European culture clash that's all about acting, as reinforced by Marilyn Monroe playing an actress to Laurence Olivier's Ruritanian regent and wannabe playboy and as made in the style of a filmed play, indeed adapted from one. Basically, the American showgirl teaches the vaunted prince of British stage and Hollywood screen how to act. The Method of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio practiced by Monroe, or mere "model" as Olivier dismissed, versus the repertoire Shakespearean theatrics of Sir Olivier, to go along with all the cultural, gender, and sex symbol biases involved. Appreciably clever and self-deprecating if director and co-star Olivier intended such and wasn't merely looking for an excuse to dump his wife and ogle a sex icon who could improve his box-office appeal. If he didn't, all the better--the one thinking it the other, himself the butt of the joke.

Regardless, the film about the making of the film, "My Week with Marilyn" (2011), wasn't exaggerating that this is, hands down, a victory of Monroe's unmatched cinematic charisma, albeit humiliating for Olivier in another respect due to Monroe's notorious unprofessionalism (constant tardiness and such) and personal problems. "Disconcerting," indeed, but that also further underlines another significant difference between screen and stage acting. It'd be hard to imagine Monroe as a theatrical performer, with the emphasis on schedule and live remembrance of lines. There's a running gag throughout the film over her routine line flubbing, her supposed artlessness, in addition to European stuffiness, in her inability to address royalty by their proper titles. Film need not be a one-take proposition, though, with editing around only the best readings and materially immortalized theoretically indefinitely, making love to an audience of one in the camera.

Taking the scenario on its own ostensible terms, "The Prince and the Showgirl" may be sometimes dull and poorly made--pacing problems, blatantly fake backdrops and process shots, the "God Save the King" blubbering of a Brit director exploiting the opportunity to make an American shed tears at Westminster Abbey, the trite debating over monarchal succession, although the American democratic commentary is interesting. Amanda Konkle in her book gives a characteristically spot-on analysis of the film, including the "un-Carpathian activities" being almost a portmanteau of an allusion and rebuke of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and McCarthyism, defending her husband playwright Arthur Miller who was a target of the witch hunts. Monroe's showgirl even inadvertently becomes a spy caught up in foreign politics.

It's the clash of acting styles, though, that's the interesting thing here. Lots of talk from Monroe's actress about line reading, waiting for cues, mimicking of manners, setting the stage, or mood (for the attempted wooing of romantic dinners, one arranged by him and another by her), and on characters speaking, or rather acting, different languages, some shared and others not. As Konkle also points out, Monroe is the audience's surrogate--we see the royal and foreign spectacle through her eyes. A fundamental difference here, too, is that Olivier relies upon a series of trade tricks to create his affectation of a stagecraft that was still largely considered practically regal with Anglophilic, upper-class cultural cache, himself receding into a caricature, whereas Monroe wasn't so much playing herself as she was, as a movie star, with democratic and proletariat appeal, to a far wider audience, always acting a persona in front of it, constantly pretending to be and refining Marilyn Monroe, to the point that the performances aren't mere character impersonations but are performances about the performances, an actress playing an actress, what others may see as a showgirl being a showgirl. The boob slip business even being a reenactment of one of her publicity stunts.

It wasn't just a matter of hitting one's mark and saying the lines with a bit of Freudian psychobabble behind it. Konkle is right to highlight the first dinner scene, of Monroe employing the food as props in Method style and to put on the dumb blonde act to amuse herself and criticize the prince's neglect. It's why Monroe doesn't look like she's acting, and Olivier does, because she was always acting in public, and he wasn't. It was an insurmountable divide. It's not that she was just a model, or even actress, although she might be excellent at either, but she was also a star, an icon.

(Note: Reportedly, the film was shot in Academy ratio, so the out-of-date DVD I saw that claimed it'd been formatted for TV (square) screens was misleading. The film, however, is said to have been soft matted in theatres into widescreen, which may explain the apparent confusion even in "My Week with Marilyn." I wonder how common that was and whether it'd be worth investigating were some Blu-ray to include both versions.)

Work Cited
Konkle, Amanda. Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe. Rutgers University Press, 2019.